Prose reading by touch: The role of stimulus quality, orthography and context

Prose reading by fluent braillists was videotaped from below transparent reading surfaces to analyse effects of stimulus degradation, inappropriate spelling and context change. All text manipulations slowed overall reading speed significantly. Stimulus quality and context also affected word speed significantly. The conjunction of stimulus degradation and context change slowed the critical words more than stimulus degradation alone. A surprising finding was that although mis-spelling lengthened overall reading speed, it did not slow the speed of the mis-spelt words. The results were consistent with current models of visual reading, but also raise further questions about the role of intact spelling respectively in word recognition and prose reading.